Our Prime Minister often displays ineptitude towards many things, including how to deal with foreign matters, writes Bruce Haigh.
WHATEVER ELSE might be said about Scott Morrison, he is not astute. He is out of his depth in a number of policy areas, particularly foreign policy. This he shares with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.
Let us hope this is the last time we have to deal with this nonsense (unlikely). The christian community needs to learn and accept that speech has consequences, particularly when you work for a company that values its reputation.
The final, and most important actual lessons from this are as follows
1 Society has evolved past the point where they require a book to tell them how to act.
2 Disagreeing with, and legislating away, your ability to discriminate against people is not discrimination against you!
3 As Anita Sarkeesian said ‘When you are used to privilege, equality seems like oppression’
When Scott Morrison told us that we needed more love, I must admit that I was a little cynical. Was this the same Scott Morrison that locked up asylum seekers, wanted those under thirty to wait six months for the dole, opposed marriage equality, restricted the notion of a “fair go” to those “having a go”, promised to repeal the Medevac legislation, and relentlessly attacked Bill Shorten and the Labor Party? Surely not! It must be some other Scott Morrison. Was our PM going soft? What next? Will he be out hugging some distraught voter Jacinda Adern style? Apart from his attachment to a lump of coal and his affectionate hug of Malcolm just before he screwed him, I’ve never seen anything resembling love from the man.
Ok, ok, love is a very private thing… Unless you’re Barnaby Joyce who’s prepared to talk about it publicly providing you can pay $150,000 for an interview.
Anyway, Mr Morrison seemed to have relinquished the idea that politicians can achieve anything when he told the congregation at Hillsong: “Our nation needs more prayer, more worship. That’s how things are overcome.”
Bad blood between media chiefs and the Morrison government deepened on Friday after Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton rejected demands to drop police action against three high-profile journalists and implied the reporters committed a crime by receiving top-secret documents.
“I think it is up to the police to investigate, to do it independently and make a decision about whether or not they prosecute,” he told Nine’s Today program.
UN
“We are seeing a lot of backsliding around the world in democratic societies around basic protections, and a lot of it has been digital interference [with press freedoms],” he said, citing newly intrusive laws in France and Britain.
“Australia is following that line. But I think it’s also gone a lot further.”
“We are in a golden age of surveillance: all these digital tools of convenience [we use] have given governments enormous technological power to get access to everything we do and everything we say,” he said.
“There is this deeply unfortunate confluence of post-9/11 and the rise of the digital age that made it close to impossible to protect the privacy of [journalistic] work.
“People could care less about journalists. But they should care about the possibility in the future to have adequate and accurate information about what their governments are doing.”
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll found Trump at an 44% approval rating—his highest since his tenure began. This is likely because people feel optimistic about the state of the economy—possibly because Trump constantly claims in the face of counterevidence that the U.S. has never had a stronger economy. Despite the fact that 65% of respondents do not consider Trump “presidential,” some predict that this poll indicates a clear path to reelection victory for the president.
Once considered a Bellarine Peninsula headache, Victoria’s flesh-eating Buruli ulcer has jumped the heads to Mornington Peninsula and is making inroads into bayside Melbourne. And nobody knows why.
As fishermen deep in the Louisiana bayou, Kindra Arnesen and her family have faced their share of life-altering challenges in recent years.
First came Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 monster storm that devastated her small fishing community in Plaquemines Parish before roaring up the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people and destroying $125 billion in property. Five years later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 40 miles offshore, spewing nearly 200 million gallons of crude. The fisheries have not fully recovered more than nine years later, nor has her family.
But this year may be worse. A historic slow-moving flood of polluted Mississippi River water loaded with chemicals, pesticides and human waste from 31 states and two Canadian provinces is draining straight into the marshes and bayous of the Gulf of Mexico — the nurseries of Arnesen’s fishing grounds — upsetting the delicate balance of salinity and destroying the fragile ecosystem in the process. As the Gulf waters warm this summer, algae feed on the freshwater brew, smothering oxygen-starved marine life.
I will make one prediction; after this is published it will be promptly followed by the remnants of the traditional media in furious pursuit of my heresy. Questions will be asked by the fourth estate and high octane derision will issue forth from the climate change actionistas.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office has relayed the message to colleagues after an outcry from Liberal and Nationals MPs over the idea of a new provision of the constitution that might gain more power over time through the courts.
The government’s position slams the door on Indigenous leaders who called two years ago for the establishment of a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution” to rectify decades of powerlessness.
It was supposed to be an exclusive party at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach, Florida. But other than the two dozen or so women flown in to provide the entertainment, the only guests were Trump and Jeffrey Epstein
Trump want’s Boris (Yeltsin) Johnston the “clown” running the UK with Nigel Farage his Ambassador. Far fetched? How to get rid of the real ambassador? Get Nigel’s best mate and journalist to release the “hacked”
In Australia mornings and afternoons are wasted listening to shock jocks, or reading tabloid muck. Many pore over pseudo-science peddled by the likes of Malcolm Roberts or the so called ‘fellows’ of the Institute of Public Affairs.
This daily jibber-jabber is the equivalent of the outpourings of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the novel 1984.
But it achieves nothing other than serving the purposes of a cohort of so called conservatives whose rhetoric seems the antithesis of conservatism.
THIS GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO BELIEVE SCIENTISTS AND WE ARE SUFFERING IN CONSEQUENCE!
*In discussing translations of the Bible, Matthew Vines indicates that the sort of same sex union which was referred to as unacceptable in the Bible was in fact pederasty or paedophilia, mistranslated, however, as homosexuality.
Send in the Clowns. What unites Boris and the Don? They are both belong and were created by Murdoch.How would Sir Kim Darroch UK Ambassador describe them? Candidly as his job requires but only one as Ambassador to the USA because hasn’t been employed to give his opinion on Boris. However we can guess what that would be. Sacked or not he will go down in history with a proud legacy. Who hacked the emails and leaked them? (ODT)
““His comments are entirely unsurprising from a historical perspective,” Calder Walton, a British lawyer and a fellow at Harvard University, wrote in an email. “Ambassadors rely on being able to give frank [often undiplomatic] opinions about their resident countries.”
In many instances, sending these unfavourable messages back home is one of the most important aspects of the job.
Extreme examples of this were the foreign ambassadors stationed in Berlin during the reign of Adolf Hitler. Though the rise of the Nazi leader was often met with carefully considered language in public, in private ambassadors would offer scathing assessments of the man.
Andre Francois-Poncet, the French ambassador to Germany, repeatedly offered warnings to Paris throughout his time in Berlin from 1931 to 1938. At first he was dismissive, writing in 1933 that “if intelligence consists essentially of a critical spirit, then Hitler is not intelligent”. (Adam Taylor The Age)
The UK’s likely next prime minister, Boris Johnson, has hinted that his country’s ambassador in Washington could be replaced after a diplomatic row with US President Donald Trump worsened on Tuesday.
Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to launch a broadside at Sir Kim Darroch, the UK ambassador to the US who has been embarrassed by the leak of a mass of diplomatic cables in which he was scathing of the “clumsy and inept” President and his divided administration. {Nick Miller The Age}
The first thing whistleblowers learn upon blowing the whistle is that speech is not really free. Freedom of speech depends on what you say. The truths that expose corruption come with a price. Whistleblowers pay that price.
Freedom of speech has been discussed more in recent times as a result of three unrelated issues:
the Israel Folau case; the ‘Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Universities’ by former Chief Justice Robert French; and the raids by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on offices of journalists involved in the “2017 Afghan Files” stories.
These issues are unrelated but are connected. They all relate to how freely we can speak.
Trump sent his bank to the Wall and now jobs jobs jobs are gone (ODT)
Certainly hundreds, possibly thousands. The businesses Deutsche Bank is exiting or cutting back are predominantly based in New York and London so it seems very likely the axe will fall harder in the UK and US than in Germany.
The bank is cutting 20% of its global workforce and the bank has nearly 8,000 people in the UK. That arithmetic gets you into the thousands quite easily.
Does it mean we are in the foothills of another financial crisis?
No. This is a problem specific to Deutsche Bank, which expanded rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s.
When the financial crisis hit it was slow to respond by cutting its business back to a more sustainable size.
Freedom and our laws shouldn’t breach the our belief in Equality and not just Equality of abuse (ODT)
Poll also shows majority of Australians don’t want employers to be able to dictate what their employees say outside of work
Conservatives within the Morrison government are campaigning for a religious freedom bill, but less than half of Coalition voters argue that there should be stronger laws to protect people who express their religious views in public, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll.
Clear majorities in the sample also agree with the statements “it is only right that people consider how what they say can affect others” (69%) and “people should not be able to argue religious freedoms to abuse others” (64%).
How to rip off peoples savings 101. What the government wants you to see a boom for you to follow in a world of debt. They want your money and you to spend spend spend until you can’t anymore.
Cut interest rates to record low margins and drive people with savings into the stock market spend and watch it boom.
Wait for the correction and then watch people suffer.Fake booms real busts losers and winners neither the realm of the elderly whose money is managed by others and only want to reach end of days without worry.
Self Managed Savings advice it’s safer under the bed than with sharks. (ODT)
Key points:
Australian shares are near record highs while interest rates are near record lows Analysts say the disconnect between the two usually means that one market will be “spectacularly wrong” However, analysts also the Australian share market is not heavily overvalued
FORMER FEDERAL MINISTERS Christopher Pyne and Julie Bishop have taken jobs with foreign corporations. They follow previous Coalition ministers who now work directly for interests abroad.
These add to recent confirmations that the Coalition parties no longer prioritise Australia.
The Australian Federal Police used national security laws to access the metadata of journalists nearly 60 times in just one year, according to a new disclosure that will be used to pressure the Morrison government to strengthen press freedom.
“It’s yet another example of the culture that’s been created in this country of an absolute disregard for the role of journalists in an open liberal democracy, and absolute contempt for whistleblowers.”
WHO CAN EXPLAIN IT?….. Peter Dutton of course (ODT)
After creating Fox News and after 20+ years Ailes was asked was he ready to go he said no not yet. “I still have to chose the next President” and he did even though he was gone. They are doing it in the UK and did it in Aus as well. However not in NZ or Canada where Murdoch doesn’t exist as yet.(ODT)
Alexis Bloom’s documentary explores the arrogance of power and the creation of Fox News
I keep hearing that the Democratic party has moved “left” and that Democratic candidates may be “too far left”.
But in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power at the top, I can’t help wondering what it means to be “left”.
A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” sought stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market.
But as wealth and power have concentrated at the top, everyone else – whether on the old right or the old left – has become disempowered and less secure.
Succsesive LNP governments have continuously cut the ABC’s funding. They killed Radio Australia after 75 years in the Pacific under Abbott. They gave $30 mill to Murdoch under Turnbull and have cut $300 mill off the ABC since 2013. Now having given China the freedom to broadcast throughout the region they wan’t to appear tho reverse the Abbott trend by not calling it a gross error but by giving the funding to commercial free to air TV $17 mill to represent their shareholders and not Australia. This gov is on a 3 year mission to smother the ABC (ODT)
The ABC has complained to the Morrison government about a plan to give $17 million to commercial television networks to bring Australian shows to the Pacific Islands, with the public broadcaster arguing it should receive the funding instead.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the three year, multi-million dollar funding initiative with FreeTV Australia in January and negotiations between the government and the commercial television group are underway.
This government is addicted to ideology and slogans. Until they start being honest about the reality of the problem’s we face as a nation, we will continue down the slide of an increasingly divided and fractured society where selfishness and greed are the only motives and more and more people fall through the cracks. The beauty of our natural wonders and our unique wildlife will be lost.
The government has delivered tax cuts. Some of us who already have a job will get an extra 20 bucks a week.
via 
olddogthoughts 
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